Now THAT was music

One grim day (when youth is over) you find that new music gets on your nerves. But why do our musical tastes freeze over?

Some of us are more susceptible than others, but eventually it happens to us all. You know what I’m talking about: the inability to appreciate new music – or at least, to appreciate new music the way we once did. There’s a lot of disagreement about why exactly this happens, but virtually none about when. Call it a casualty of your 30s, the first sign of a great decline. Recently turned 40, I’ve seen it happen to me – and to a pretty significant extent – but refuse to consider myself defeated until the moment I stop fighting.

I’ve been fighting it for more than 10 years now, with varying degrees of vigour and resolve. Sometimes the fight becomes too much – one tires of the small victories that never break open into anything larger – and the spirit flags. I continually if not consistently stay abreast of what’s deemed the best of the new – particularly in rap and rock and R&B (which I stubbornly and unapologetically refer to, like a true devotee of its 1960s incarnation, as ‘soul’). These ventures into the current and contemporary have reaped dividends so small, they can be recounted – will be recounted – with no trouble at all.

But why should I care? Why should any of us care? Maybe it’s about the fear of becoming what we’ve always loathed: someone reflexively and guiltlessly willing to serve up a load of things-were-better-in-my-day, one of the most facile and benighted of all declarations. If you take pride in regarding yourself as culturally current, always willing to indulge the best of everything wherever it’s found, such taste blockages can be pretty frustrating, even embarrassing. And that hoary old consolation for the erectile dysfunction of the slightly older – ‘It happens to everyone’ – is no consolation at all.

The epic rise and disgusting flameout of the artist who ruled 80s New York

In the early 1980s, a series of shadowy street paintings — life-size monsters and cowboys — loomed large over the East Village. Anticipating the works of Banksy by more than a decade, the unsigned figures were created under cover of darkness on buildings and bridges. They weren’t mere graffiti, but painterly works reminiscent of Jackson Pollock. Downtown residents buzzed about who could be behind them.

The art world knew who it was: a soft-spoken Canadian — often clad in a cravat and sunglasses — named Richard Hambleton.

At downtown galleries, his mysterious figures fetched thousands of dollars more than work by his friends Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring. He attended parties with beautiful women on his arm, and Andy Warhol begged him, in vain, to sit for a portrait.

Hambleton canvased Manhattan with some 450 shadow men — and managed to get a few on the Berlin Wall, too. But by the 1990s, he was largely forgotten, living in a drug den on the Lower East Side. He was so poor that he would shoot himself up with heroin, then use the blood in his needle as paint. At some point, he lost half his nose. (He won’t discuss his health, but he has numerous ailments, including skin cancer.)

But lately, Hambleton, 64, has been emerging from his shadowy existence. Hip galleries have begun showing his work again. He’s recognized as the godfather of street art, and his influence can be seen in the works of painters such as Banksy, Blek le Rat and the Brooklyn duo FAILE. And a documentary about his life and work, “Shadowman,” will debut at the Tribeca Film Festival Friday.

Will the high-tech cities of the future be utterly lonely?

by Jessica Brown

Maciej Bledowski / Alamy Stock Photo

Humans are inherently social animals, and our health suffers if we’re cut off from social ties. So it’s no wonder the so-called loneliness “epidemic” is being called a public health crisis. But as we sit on the cusp of massive technological advances, the near future could exacerbate this growing problem.

Loneliness can happen to anyone. It is indiscriminate of age, country, and social status. In Britain, more than one in eight people say they don’t consider anyone a close friend, and the number of Americans who say they have no close friends has roughly tripled in recent decades. A large proportion of the lonely are young; almost two-thirds of 16- to 24-year-old Brits said they feel lonely at least some of the time, while almost a third are lonely often or all the time.

One pervasive source of our loneliness is technology. While it offers an easy way to keep in contact with friends — and meet new people through dating and friendship apps — technology’s omnipresence encourages shallow conversations that can distract us from meaningful, real-life, interactions. Researchers at the University of Essex found that having a phone nearby, even if we don’t check it, can be detrimental to our attempts at connecting with others. Smartphones have transformed post office lines from a chance for some small-talk with the neighbors to an exercise in email-checking, and sealed the fate of coffee shops as nothing more than places of mutual isolation. And technology will only become more ingrained in our lives.

Rocks of ages: How meteorites reveal the solar system’s history

Clever ways to find more space debris, and pinpoint where it came from, will help us rewrite what we know about the solar system’s turbulent youth

By Sophia Chen

Shutterstock

A MAN with a Stetson perched on his head reclines in his chair, an assortment of rocks displayed in front of him. A second man in a fedora browses the collection, pausing over one specimen. The size of a chocolate bar, the silvery rock is inlaid with a mosaic of grainy grey shapes.

“What are you asking for that one?” asks the fedora.

“Oh, somewhere around five thousand,” replies the Stetson.

It’s a routine exchange at the annual Tucson Gem, Mineral & Fossil Showcase in Arizona, a marketplace for international collectors of petrified wood, dinosaur bones, gold and more. Except there’s something special about this rock: it came from space.

Physicists create fluid with ‘negative mass’

Scientists created a liquid with “negative mass.” The experiments could help scientists investigate astrophysical phenomena like black holes and dark matter. Photo by NASA/UPI

April 17 (UPI) — A team of physicists at Washington State University have created a fluid that ignores Isaac Newton‘s Second Law of Motion. The fluid has “negative mass.” When it’s pushed it accelerates backwards.

Almost all matter in the universe obey’s Newton’s second law — matter accelerates in the direction of the force applied to it. The new fluid does the opposite.

“With negative mass, if you push something, it accelerates toward you,” Michael Forbes, an assistant professor of physics and astronomy at Washington State, said in a news release.

The liquid consists of rubidium atoms cooled to a temperature barely greater than absolute zero. The cooled atoms formed a Bose-Einstein condensate, a phase of matter characterized by slow-moving particles that behave like waves. The matter behaves like a superfluid, meaning its particles move in unison without sacrificing energy.

Scientists have unpicked the regions of the brain involved in dreaming, in a study with significant implications for our understanding of the purpose of dreams and of consciousness itself. What’s more, changes in brain activity have been found to offer clues as to what the dream is about.

Dreaming had long been thought to occur largely during rapid eye-movement (REM) sleep, a period of slumber involving fast brain activity similar to that when awake, but dreams have also been reported to occur during non-REM sleep, leaving scientists scratching their heads as to the hallmark of dreaming.

“It seemed a mystery that you can have both dreaming and the absence of dreaming in these two different types of stages,” said Francesca Siclari, co-author of the research from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the US.

A Shrimp That Can Kill With Sound Is Named After Pink Floyd

Synalpheus pinkfloydi, which was recently named after the band Pink Floyd, for the distinctive coloration of its claw. Arthur Anker/Courtesy of Sammy De Grave and Oxford University

Legend has it that the band Pink Floyd once played so loudly at a show that the sheer volume had killed all the fish in a nearby pond.

Now there’s a new species of shrimp, named after Pink Floyd, that can kill fish by making a loud noise. Synalpheus pinkfloydi rapidly opens then snaps closed its large claw, generating frequencies up to 210 decibels — louder than a typical rock concert and loud enough to kill small fish nearby.

It turns out, however, that its new name has nothing to do with that urban myth about Pink Floyd’s volume. Dr. Sammy DeGrave, head of research at Oxford University Museum of National History, says the inspiration for the shrimp’s name was really the color of its claw: pink. “The reference is to the line, ‘By the way, which one of you is Pink?’ from the song ‘Have A Cigar’,” DeGrave told NPR when reached over the phone. “The story is when Pink Floyd first went to America, people thought one of the band members was actually named Pink. A reporter asked, ‘Which one of you is pink?” so that’s what stuck in our mind and that’s where [the name] came from.”

Bob Probert carved out a fearsome reputation as an enforcer, during a lengthy career spent with the Red Wings and Blackhawks, before dying of a heart attack in 2010 at age 45. So with Detroit’s Joe Louis Arena set to host its final game Sunday, Probert’s widow found the perfect way to honor both her husband’s memory and that of the facility in which he performed for nine seasons.

By scattering some of his ashes in the penalty box.

“This is bittersweet for me,” Dani Probert, the widow of 6-foot-3, 230-pound former player, told the Detroit Free Press before Sunday’s game, which featured numerous ceremonies and appearances from several past Red Wings stars. “I have brought some of Bob’s ashes to the game. At Christmas time, I came here with my family and the urn with his ashes and we took a photo of us sitting in the penalty box.”

Nasa announces one of Saturn’s moons could support alien life in our solar system

There might be alien life in our own solar system, Nasa has announced.

All of the necessary things to support life have been found on one of the moons that orbits Saturn.

Enceladus has chemicals that when found on Earth tend to indicate life, suggesting that there might be living things might be under its icy shell.

Scientists have long thought of Enceladus as one of the prime candidates for life within our solar system or anywhere else nearby, in large part because it is a planetary body with an ocean that covers its entire surface. But the new research gives the best look yet at that moon, showing that it has a chemical energy source capable of supporting life.

Photos: California Bursts With Spring Colors

The hills are alive with the colors of spring. California’s bright colors are in full bloom after one of the state’s wettest winters in years nourished wildflowers, some which had been dormant for years. Check out some of the amazing scenes from the late winter season after a series of storms that pumped life into the Antelope Valley poppy fields, Griffith Park’s hillsides, vast expanses of the Central Valley and the bright fields of flowers near the tiny town of Borrego Springs, where the spectacular wildflower display that has drawn record crowds and traffic. An estimated 150,000 people have visited the town about 85 northeast of San Diego in the past month to see the bright spring colors. The colors are expected to continue in May with different species blooming at different elevations. Send your photos to isee@nbcla.com.

The Encephalophone Is a Real Instrument You Can Play with Your Mind

Researchers at the University of Washington have found that it may also help treat neurological problems.

Today in Cool Stuff Brought to You by Science, we have the encephalophone—an invention that, despite sounding like a discarded Muppet Show prop, is actually a fascinating new instrument developed for neurological and music research.

The instrument works by translating brain waves through a synthesizer, essentially allowing users to play it with their minds. To do so, a subject wears a cap fitted with electrodes (à la every dystopian sci-fi flick you’ve ever seen) that is connected to a computer synthesizer set up. That in turn produces an array of electronic string, piano, and other instrument sounds based on brain patters. Those patterns, of course, can be tricky to wrangle—notes can be set off by facial movements as well as intended thoughts—but, as with mastering any instrument, musicians and researchers say that’s half the fun.

The device was profiled in the Seattle Times this week for its role in an ongoing project led by Dr. Thomas Deuel at the University of Washington. The Swedish neurologist and musician has been working with the institution’s DXARTS program, which fosters work between scientists and artists. It’s there, while overseeing a lab focused on the relationship between art and neurology, that Deuel and his team have been using the instrument to help treat a local choir director who lost her ability to make music after contracting a viral infection in her brain.

Was Banksy Caught on Camera at a Mall in Israel?

A woman in Israel claims to have caught the elusive artist Banksy on camera. Image via Daily Mail on YouTube

Could this be the last word on one of today’s biggest art mysteries? Has the identity of the world’s most famous street artist Banksy been revealed once and for all?

Several British tabloids, including the Daily Mail, ran stories this weekend showing footage captured with a mobile phone camera by an anonymous woman, who claims to have caught the elusive Bristol-born artist in action, working on a show that’s slated to open to the public tomorrow inside a mall in Herzlyia, Israel.

The 20-second clip shows a man appearing to be in his forties working inside an art space, and holding a stencil in his hand. He’s wearing a white Panama hat, but his spray-paint mask is lowered to his neck, such that his face is fully exposed. The man is seen looking straight at the camera. As soon as he realizes that he is being filmed, he raises his hand to obliterate his face.

VENICE — Damien Hirst is staring into the eyes of a jade Buddha, its face seemingly abraded by the vestiges of time. “I think he looks damn good, considering he’s 2,000 years old,” he said, straining to keep a straight face. Nearby, the sculpture of a pharaoh fashioned from blue granite and displaying a gold nipple ring bears an uncanny resemblance to Pharrell Williams.

Is the face really that of the singer? “You could say that,” Mr. Hirst responded. “It’s all about what you want to believe.”

After years of uncharacteristic silence, this artist known for his love-it-or-hate-it artworks is orchestrating his own comeback. On a recent morning, dressed all in black, Mr. Hirst could be found in the soaring entrance of the Palazzo Grassi watching his crew put the finishing touches on an extravaganza worthy of Cecil B. DeMille — his first major show of new work in 10 years. Opening to the public on Sunday, April 9, and called “Treasures From the Wreck of the Unbelievable,” it is an underwater fantasy, with sculptures like the Buddha and hundreds of other objects fashioned to look as though they were antiquities dredged up from the bottom of the sea. The works will fill the Palazzo Grassi and the Punta della Dogana, two museums run by François Pinault, the Parisian collector who is also the owner of Christie’s auction house.

I can’t exactly remember the first time I saw or became aware of Chesty Morgan. Which is odd, especially since she is best known for her strange assortment of bad wigs and a 73-inch, all natural bust line. It’s like she has always been a part of my life. Like one stoic, large breasted angel, whose face vacillates between confused and languid in Doris Wishman’s surrealistic exploitation film, Deadly Weapons.

Lest there is any question about what type of titular weaponry we are talking about here, the first 30 seconds will immediately set you straight. After a few seconds of some groovy, 60’s rock, a loud drone type noise emerges and then suddenly there’s Chesty, or Zsa Zsa, as she is billed in the film, with her arms outstretched like a menacing breasty crane. The rock soundtrack comes back and then we are treated to Chesty Morgan admiring and vaguely fondling her breasts in a series of modern type, circular mirrors. The psychedelic fun house effect, while maybe not the most sexy thing in the world, is great and fitting. (After all, Deadly Weapons is a keen example of a sexploitation carnival ride, so grab a ticket, strap on your lap-belt and enjoy!)

Chesty stars as Crystal, a successful advertising executive who loves chunky shoes, pantyhose and her jocular, hairy chested lover, Larry (Richard Towers). While the affection is very much shared, Larry’s tied up with some very shady, underworld types, often flanked by Tony (the great Harry Reems) and a balding gent with an eye patch (Mitchell Fredericks) that goes by the name Captain Hook. They pull a hit on one well-connected man, with a powerful little black book. Larry finds it first and slips it into his jacket, in effect pulling a silent double cross on his partners. As you can imagine, his plan does not flesh out well and once he is found out to be a fink, they ice him.

Don Rickles, Legendary Comic With a Gift for the Insult, Dies at 90

“Mr. Warmth” forged a career when he turned the tables on his hecklers, going on to make fun of everyone he encountered — even Frank Sinatra.

Don Rickles, the rapid-fire insult machine who for six decades earned quite a living making fun of people of all creeds and colors and everyone from poor slobs to Frank Sinatra, has died. He was 90.

The legendary comic died Thursday at his home in Los Angeles of kidney failure, publicist Paul Shefrin announced.

Sarcastically nicknamed “Mr. Warmth,” Rickles had mock disdain for stars, major public figures and all those who paid to see him, tweaking TV audiences and Las Vegas showroom crowds with his acerbic brand of takedown comedy. A good guy and devoted husband away from the stage, Rickles the performer heartlessly laid into everyone he encountered — and they loved it.

Earth-sized telescope set to snap first picture of a black hole

The Event Horizon Telescope will take images of the black hole at the centre of our galaxy, and could reveal how relativity and quantum mechanics mesh

By Leah Crane

GET ready to peer into the unknown. This week, we will have our first chance to take a picture of the supermassive black hole at the centre of our galaxy. The image could teach us how black holes work and even how the largest and smallest forces governing the universe fit together.

The Event Horizon Telescope is switching on. It consists of eight radio observatories around the world, including telescopes in Spain, the US and Antarctica (see map). And for just four or five nights between 5 and 14 April, if the weather is clear at all of the observatories, they will all turn on at once.

“Event horizons have been part of the mythology of science, but they will become real”

Each telescope will point at Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole at the centre of the Milky Way, and measure every radio wave coming from its direction. Linking together observatories spread across such a huge area and combining their observations to filter out extra light will effectively create a powerful “virtual telescope” almost the size of Earth.

In a small, cold film studio in early 2016, the man known by the Internet as the “worst director in the world” was doing what he does, well, worst.

“O.K., one more time,” said Uwe Boll (his first name is pronounced “OO-vah”), feeding lines to one of the actors in the absence of a script. “Straight in the lens: ‘. . . has been killed. By the law . . . er . . . the law enforcement? Has been shot by law enforcement.’ Yes. O.K., do it. Ready, and . . . Action!”

“This is the worst-looking set,” assistant director Michael Pohorly admitted between takes. “The budget on this set was . . . nothing. Twenty dollars for a lick of paint? It’s a $20 set.”

Ridge Studios, a former bingoplex in suburban Maple Ridge, Vancouver, had recently accommodated shoots for the Hallmark Channel specials Family for Christmas and Angel of Christmas, a 2016 Kindergarten Copsequel, and the family comedy-drama series Date My Dad. This time last year it was home to Rampage: President Down, the 30th and, for now, final film by Boll. After a failed attempt to crowdfund the film, Boll uploaded a video to YouTube titled “Fuck You All,” in which he abruptly announced his retirement from filmmaking.

James Rosenquist, Pop Art Pioneer, Dies at 83

“F-111” (1964-5). All Rights Reserved, James Rosenquist/Licensed by VAGA, New York

James Rosenquist, who helped define Pop Art in its 1960s heyday with his boldly scaled painted montages of commercial imagery, died on Friday in New York City. He was 83 years old.

Like his contemporaries Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein, Mr. Rosenquist developed a powerful graphic style in the early 1960s that traditionalists reviled and a broad public enthusiastically embraced.

The Pop artists took for their subject matter images and objects from the mass media and popular culture, including advertising, comic books and consumer products. They also employed techniques that until then had been associated primarily with commercial and industrial methods of production, like silk screening or, in Mr. Rosenquist’s case, billboard painting.

Mr. Rosenquist himself drew on his experience painting immense movie billboards above Times Square and a Hebrew National sign in Brooklyn.

It was while working in New York as a sign painter by day and an abstract painter by night that he had the idea to import the giant-scale, broadly painted representational pictures from outdoor advertising into the realm of fine art.

A live stream of Shia LaBeouf chanting was disrupted by Nazi-themed dancing. Then things got weird.

On the day of President Trump’s inauguration, two poorly understood forces of the Internet collided in a sort of bizarre death lock — a struggle that has manifested in the real world as Nazi-costumed dances in New York, a meticulously planned theft in rural Tennessee and last month, a raid on a British rooftop.

These forces are called 4chan and Shia LaBeouf.

LaBeouf is a Hollywood star who recently restyled himself as a highly meme-able performance artist — limiting his public utterances to a string of repeat tweets, for example, or showing up to a film festival with a paper bag on his head.

4chan is the magmatic underworld of the Internet: an anonymous forum whose millions of users gave the world the delights of Rickrolling, the misogyny of Gamergate and the corruption of Pepe the Frog.

Lately, 4chan’s vast energies have been spent disrupting a single webcam. LaBeouf’s art group installed the camera outside a museum in New York on Jan. 20, inviting the public to join the star in chanting: “He will not divide us … he will not divide us.”

Dubbed “Season 1” on 4chan and associated forums, the New York live stream was forced to relocate after self-professed neo-Nazis and other disrupters kept making cameos — provoking LaBeouf until he was arrested and accused of assaulting a troll.

Since then, the struggle has shifted to Seasons 2 through 4 — in which trolls pursued the webcam across the United States, until the artists were forced to replace the public chanting with a live feed of a guarded flag, which forum users have twice found and tried to steal, most recently on a rooftop in Britain.

These are dark days. But Bob Ross painted approximately 403 tranquil landscapes for each episode of his long-running, 21-season instructive PBS show The Joy of Painting, each peppered with babbling brooks, cloud-filled blue skies and valleys of happy little trees just so that one day, in your darkest moments, you might glean some happiness from this black world.

The artist and television host died in 1995, but he allegedly produced thousands of artworks in his lifetime, some of which he donated to PBS and others which have since been sold at auction, according to a 2012 investigation from Mental Floss. For fans looking to delve a little deeper into the works Ross created on camera, in real-time, as he painstakingly walked viewers step-by-step through each color and brushstroke so that you too might be able to paint your own masterpiece at home and know the joys of painting firsthand, look no further than Austrian coder and student Felix Auer‘s comprehensive, but “unofficial,” online database TwoInchBrush.

As Hyperallergic’s Claire Voon points out, Ross aficionados can search paintings on the database by color or season, and the site contains a section for guest painters who joined him on the show through the years, such as the artist’s son Steve or his former instructor John Thamm. Auer has gone to such great lengths to make TwoInchBrush a one-stop-shop for Ross fans, that he’s created a guide to the type of brushes the artist used to create his signature happy little trees, cute little bushes and big fluffy clouds, and even includes recommendations for paints, paint thinner, canvases and even palates to use all based on those the artist used most frequently on the show. And now that a trove of Joy of Painting episodes are available to watch in-full on YouTube, Auer includes links to the corresponding paintings in his archive whenever there’s a video available.